“Arranged in five chronological sections, theirs was an often recondite correspondence, by turns cryptic or dramatic, essentially small essays on poetics and exchanges of latest works or comments on their reading. The letters are also full of affectionate greetings (‘my dear Dunk’) and humor.”—The Times Literary Supplement
“These letters illuminate and inform many of the most important discussions in US poetry of the time.”—Daniel Katz, American Literary History
“Invaluable archival documents. . . . Bertholf and Smith also supply a strong accounting of the context of Olson and Duncan’s correspondence in their introduction to An Open Map.”—Eric Keenaghan, Journal of Modern Literature
“In these two companion volumes [An Open Map and Imagining Persons] . . . the letters are complete, the lectures are beveled, and a nimble apparatus of introductions, notes, glossaries, bibliographies, and indices nearly half as long as the texts themselves collapses the distance between these documents’ moment and our own.”—Jacket2
“An essential correspondence between two [of] the most innovative and visionary poets in American literature. In these letters is contained the generative energies of some of the best poetry written in the twentieth century.”—Peter O’Leary, author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness
